You completed the basic QuickBooks interview. Now what? Using the information presented in this chapter, learn to customize your QuickBooks experience so that the program produces exactly the results your company requires as well as being able to add additional information that you might have skipped over or not thought of during the interview process.

In the first chapter, you learned how to set up your company using the EasyStep Interview. Because the interview gathers the basic start-up information necessary to use your QuickBooks program, you can now use QuickBooks on a daily basis in a style that fits your business needs, without having to continually re-enter those pieces of information.

That said, you might find that you need to enter more information into your QuickBooks company file after the interview is completed. Using the information presented in this chapter, you’ll be able to customize your QuickBooks experience so that the program produces exactly the results your company requires as well as being able to add additional information that you might have skipped over or not thought of during the interview process.

QuickBooks uses lists to keep track of everything, including your chart of accounts, your company’s vendors and customers, employees, jobs on which you’re working, different options for terms of payment, payroll items that are used for paychecks, and more. All the information that’s entered on QuickBooks forms is stored in a list. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to add to lists, change information already existing on lists, change the placement of list entries, sort lists, remove entries from lists, and combine list entries. When you change an item on a list, those changes carry through to the forms you use in QuickBooks and the reports you create.

Setting General Preferences

QuickBook’s general preferences affect the way the program works and provide you with an opportunity to set technical performance options, such as what happens when you press the Enter key, how information appears on your screen, and how the editing features work. After you’ve used QuickBooks for a while, you might want to revisit the general preferences and make changes to those preferences to make your time spent in QuickBooks easier or more efficient.

Set Personal General Preferences

Open the Preferences dialog box by selecting Edit, Preferences.

Click the General option on the left side of the Preferences dialog box.

Click the My Preferences tab at the top of the dialog box if that tab is not already selected.

Check the Pressing Enter Moves Between Fields box if you want to use the Enter key to move between fields the way the Tab key works; otherwise, pressing Enter typically completes a transaction.

Check the Automatically Open Drop-Down Lists When Typing box if you want QuickBooks to always display a list of options for your data fields.

If Beep When Recording a Transaction is checked, you’ll hear a “beep” sound every time you complete a transaction.

If you want to type 1234 and have it appear as 12.34, check the Automatically Place Decimal Point box; otherwise 1234 will appear as 1,234.00.

Checking the Warn When Editing a Transaction option results in a pop-up box appearing every time you make changes to a previously saved transaction.

Check Bring Back All One Time Messages to restore the pop-up reminder messages that gave you an option if you didn’t want to see the messages again.

If the pop-up sales pitch messages are sounding a bit too familiar, turn them off completely by checking Turn Off Pop-Up Messages for Products and Services (or uncheck if you want to start seeing them again).

When you check the ToolTips option and then place your mouse over a field where the text is too long, QuickBooks displays the extended text.

The Warn When Deleting option causes a pop-up warning to appear whenever you attempt to delete a transaction or an item that hasn’t been used.

Check Automatically Remember Account or Transaction Information if you want QuickBooks to read your mind. When using the recall options, as soon as you start typing, QuickBooks finds the customer or vendor that matches your entry and fills in the appropriate information.

Select Use Today’s Date as Default for new transactions, or you can choose the Use the Last Entered Date as Default box instead.

Choose how you want QuickBooks to treat customized descriptions that you enter on forms—keep the description you enter on a form even if you change the item selection (Always), remove the description when an item is changed (Never), or Ask with each circumstance.

You can override customer or vendor information entered by QuickBooks. When you begin a transaction, such as writing a check, you can change the information that fills in automatically right on the form you are using.

If you check Automatically Remember Account or Transaction Information, you can choose to either have QuickBooks automatically recall name and amount information from the last transaction you entered for this name, or you can choose to have QuickBooks pre-fill in the name of a particular vendor based on your collective previous entries.

Set Company General Preferences

With General still selected on the left side of the Preferences dialog box, click the Company Preferences tab at the top of the box.

Choose whether you prefer to have time shown in Decimal or Minutes format. The Minutes choice is significant if you use QuickBooks for tracking time.

Check the Always Show Years as 4 Digits (1999) box, or uncheck the box if you want to display two-digit years.

If you change the vendor or customer information on a form, QuickBooks prompts you to update the customer or vendor record. You may select the Never Update option to prevent changes to the customer or vendor information.

Checking the box to Save Transactions Before Printing, will automatically save your forms when you press the print button on the form.

You can quickly update customer or vendor information while filling out a form. With your cursor in the customer or vendor field, press Ctrl+L to open the customer or vendor list. Double-click the name of the customer or vendor you want to edit, make your changes, click OK to save the changes, and then press Esc to close the list.

Important

Save your changes. Any changes you make in the QuickBooks preferences dialog box are ignored by the program if you click the “X” or press Esc to close the preferences window. Be sure to click the OK button to save all your changes.